Edinburgh

Next we spent a few days in Edinburgh.

Oxford is a very beautiful town, and until recently, I would have said it was the prettiest city I had ever been to. That has since changed. Edinburgh is unbelievably beautiful. Granted, it was also unbelievably cold, but there's only so much you can do about that. Our hotel was right next to the center of town, which was also very nice.

Edinburgh Castle is what all castles want to be. It's up on a massive hill in the middle of town, and is incredibly impressive. So, naturally, we went there first. They've got a good-sized war museum in the castle, which was pretty neat, especially all of the stuff about the history of the various Highland regiments. There is also a war monument pertaining especially to the First World War which was beautiful, and quite sobering.

They have a very large cannon that they fire once a day from the castle at 1:00 in the afternoon, and we were up there watching one day as they fired it. It's... very, very loud. Like, louder than that.

It's difficult to describe just how impressive the castle is. Here are some pictures, to try to give you the right impression.

While in Edinburgh, we also went to look at the Scottish National Gallery, which had some very impressive (and famous) paintings in it. One thing they had up was a collection of watercolor paintings by a man whose name I can't remember. I had never seen watercolor paintings that looked anything like this-- far from being washed-out and pale the way watercolors often look, they were impressively vivid and just generally quite impressive.

Also in Edinburgh, we went to a pub, where Erin had some of the best mussels of her life and I had a masterfully poured pint of Guinness. (As well as a hamburger which was pretty good.)

Also, we saw a statue of David Hume, which was pretty neat, since we're both big philosophy geeks. Less neat for the rest of you, who maybe don't care as much.

--Bill